First of all...
Thanks to everyone who played our game and gave us feedback! As game developers ourselves, we're constantly trying to answer the question of... "What makes a game fun?" and what part of a game is "not fun" or "annoying" so that we can incorporate our learnings into the game we're actually working on.
*I don't want anyone to think we're upset about our scores - it's a competition with no prize and with a poorly designed scoring system. We understand that and are really thankful for the opportunity to work on a game that we had a blast making. I pulled two all-nighters for LD because I love doing it and because it's truly an amazing time. Doing LD for the past 5-6 years has been one of the things that have helped me grow and learn as a programmer and as an artist. *
Our results
Conclusions
1. If you have more content, people have more things to criticize.
Every LD that's gone by we've attempted to make some form of first person 3D game with puzzle solving, some form of story telling, animations, combat, etc. We've played around with different form factors and every LD we plan a lot, but end up cutting out a large portion of the content we had planned to make. This jam was no different. However, this year we actually focused on content. We took feedback from previous jams and tried to make something that would be fun and enjoyable.
Our game had 5 unique islands with unique level design (levels), a tutorial, an overworld/hub, puzzles, 4 enemy types (all modeled, rigged, animated, and hand painted during the jam), 3 different weapons, an ambush/combat system, a hint mechanic, and interaction system. We had 4 different types of pickups. Everything was hand painted. We had sounds for almost everything, and music that gently switched between combat and exploration. We even had an actual ending goal for the game as well as multiple routes the player could choose from and everything was wide open.
We had audio ambiences, and flying birds off in the distance, swimming, different post-processing effects for when you are underwater/paused/drunk. We had 4 different types of crosshairs that changed whenever you equipped a different item, or if you were looking at an interactable item.
I painted a map, used it to create a dynamic level loading system that could take us between areas, because we explicitly wanted more content in our game. It slowly unfurls across the screen, and then the player can "sail" to a different level. Could we have made a basic LIST OF LEVELS - yes, but we wanted to be stylized and do it nicely.
Now, I know that MORE CONTENT != BETTER QUALITY. In fact, we even attempted to go for a lower graphical fidelity style just so that we could make more areas. I'll admit that modeling, rigging, animating, and texturing a MONKEY by hand during the jam meant that it turned out a little bit creepier than we wanted. I know that there were tons of things we didn't get around to explaining.
That said, it seems that every jam our games get more and more complicated with more and more content, and with more content, two things happen:
- More things can go wrong (the testing matrix for bugs gets more complex)
- More things are not perfect, and thus great candidates to nitpick at.
If I played a game where somebody moves a box around a maze and gets to the end of the maze... and that was the whole game, there really would be very much to criticize. The game is small, and might even be fun, but when leaving feedback on the game, if the game was super polished, there wouldn't be anything to deduct points from.
It's really easy to take points off in your head, from a game that has lots of things you can nitpick at. Somebody told us they'd give us a higher score if the monsters weren't so scary. Others said the game was too dark. Others said they don't like combat, and others that they didn't like collecting pickups and for that, we lost points. It's really easy to lose points when you have a lot of stuff that people can dislike, because the rating is subjective.
2. People can sometimes be really bad at following instructions
Many of the people we watched on stream ignored a lot of the hint messages we peppered throughout the game and then complained that they didn't know where to go or what to do. Others said the game was too dark, despite the fact that we had brightness controls in the settings menu.
This feedback is INCREDIBLY valuable, because it highlights something about how discoverable our menus are, or how good our hints are, or how well we direct the player in certain directions to help them know what to do, maybe with lights, or pickup trails, etc. Watching people struggle at the game helps you learn a lot about how to improve.
We explicitly made a collect-a-thon this year because we've had this problem in the past, so we tried to guide the player around our maps with pickups, but it turns out that our level design is not the very best when you build all of the levels at the very end and there is not enough time to balance/play-test everything.
But goodness gracious - despite having tons of instructions in game, on our LD page, on our itch.io page, people keep missing really basic things and then getting frustrated/stuck, and our score takes a hit. :(
3. Ludum Dare scoring is extremely biased against longer games.
Our goal was to have content, and we did that, but I know of very few people who actually got to the end of our game. Our ending was crappy and basically a victory screen with a total score (time limitations, ya know). Our game was little bit longer, sure, but it's easily beatable in 30 minutes, and all of the best levels are near the end.
It's very obvious, looking at the top games, that Ludum Dare skews toward arcade style games. Don't get me wrong - a lot of those games DEFINITELY deserve their place for their level of polish, quality, innovation, etc. But the scoring system rewards players for making small, bite-sized games that are easy to play, and wipe your hands clean of after you've rated them. Most of those games can be finished completely in under 5 minutes.
Once again, I'm not upset about my score, because it really wasn't the best of games, but you see your game ranked at the same level as a side-scroller that you use WASD to get to the exit, or somebody's "press left and right to catch falling items" game. These are fine, but the LD scoring is biased toward these arcade style games with scores, or puzzle style games with like 5 levels that you can finish in a few minutes. It's an unfortunate fact of how the scoring works for this competition.
4. An increasing reward system implies that very few people actually get a chance to experience the coolest and most interesting parts of your game.
This is a problem we've had in the past for some of our past jams, but this LD, it was very visible. Our coolest weapon, the Hand Cannon, nobody talked about, which made it pretty obvious that very few people actually put in the 10-20 minutes it takes to get to that portion of the game.
Our final level (Pyramid Island) was our best designed level, with tons of secrets, lots of discoverables, lots of looping pathways, a really interesting setting, etc, but since it was at the end of the game, almost nobody played it.
In general, when we want to reward the player with different mechanics that you unlock across the course of the game, it seems like LD is not the place to make those kinds of games, particularly because of point #3.
5. The theme is supposed to inspire your game, not tell you what kind of game to make.
The theme is optional, but for some reason, people keeping picking themes that will force everyone to make basically the same kind of game. This Ludum Dare had basically 5 kinds of games:
- Games where you make money doing something
- Games where you do something and lose health/lives as a result of progressing the game
- Games where currency heals you
- Games where you literally are money
- Games where you waste your life away in terms of years
This at least is okay..., but if, say, Tiny Town had won, everyone would have made a game... about a Tiny Town? Or sometimes the theme attempts to force a specific genre or adds some form of horrible limitation that makes all of the games basically the same.
The theme is supposed to be inspirational, and help guide the direction of the game, rather than prescriptive (telling you literally what kind of game to make). Yet, when we take the theme figuratively and make a game about a pirate who's lost all of his treasure that he's spent his whole life collecting (AND we add in the mechanic that picking up coins heals you), we score in the bottom 25% of the theme category. People gave us a lot of feedback saying they didn't see how it fits into the theme, despite us literally writing it in the text of the game in about 3 different places.
This happens every time we go for a more "inspired" approach to the theme. I'd love it if people would either:
a) Vote for themes that inspire games, rather than limit them
b) Look for the subtlety in the interpretation of the theme
6. Ludum Dare is incredible.
Despite my jeremiad against LD above, I still love it. I think it's like going to the gym for game developers - helping me to grow my muscles for game dev. Every time I do LD, I learn a ton, get better at understanding game architecture, and have a blast play other peoples' games.
There's something about this jam in particular that is really special, and I look forward to working with all of you guys in October!
Feedback Word Cloud
As it seems to be LD tradition, and this is my 8th jam, here's our feedback as a word cloud:
